Stowe, "Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl,"478. Stowe did not recall
exactly which antislavery texts, so she used as her example "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof," the famous
slogan of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Truth spread the banner
over the pulpit in 1853 when she lectured in New York City. According to
the report in the Tribune, 8 November 1853, the slogans included the even
more famous "Am I not a Woman and a Sister": "Pendant from the pulpit
cushion was a banner of white satin, on which was inscribed: Ashtabula
County. / Am I not a Woman and a Sister! / [Kneeling figure of a woman
with uplifted hands.] / How long, O Lord! how long. / A Million-and-a-
half of American Women in chains. / Shall we heed their wrongs? / Will
not a righteous God be avenged upon / such a Nation as this!"

Anti-Slavery Bugle, 28 August 1852. For an analysis of the Constitutional
debate between these factions, see Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Anti-Slavery Thought ( Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1973), 188-208.

The passage is our translation of the following dialect rendering of Truth's
vision by
Joseph Dugdale, which was printed in National Anti-Slavery
Standard, 4 July 1863:

Children, I talks to God and God talks to me. I goes out and talks to God
in de fields and de woods. [The weevil had destroyed thousands of acres of
wheat in the West that year.] Dis morning I was walking out, and I got
over de fence. I saw de wheat a holding up its head, looking very big. I
goes up and takes holt ob it. You b'lieve it, dere was no wheat dare? I says,
God [speaking the name in a voice of reverence peculiar to herself], what
is de matter wid dis wheat? and he says to me, " Sojourner, dere is a little
weasel in it." Now I hears talkin' about de Constitution and de rights of
man. I comes up and I takes hold of dis Constitution. It looks mighty big,
and I feels for my rights, but der aint any dare. Den I says, God, what ails
dis Constitution? He says to me, " Sojourner, dere is a little weasel in it."

See
John R. McKivigan, "The Frederick Douglass-Gerrit Smith Friendship
and Political Abolitionism in the 1850s," in Frederick Douglass: New Literary
and Historical Essays, edited by
Eric J. Sundquist ( Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), 205-32, for the stages of Douglass's evolution into
political action and the presidential election year politics of 1852.

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